But the survey, commissioned by StopSlots Maryland, shows nearly 8 percent of respondents had not decided how they would vote, and previous polls have shown slots proponents with wide majorities.
Opponents have been emphasizing the crime, addiction, bankruptcies and suicides associated with gambling, with downtrodden populations particularly affected. Comptroller Peter Franchot and state lawmakers appeared Friday at Baltimore's Harbour Pointe, the oldest treatment center in the nation solely dedicated to treating compulsive gambling.
Meanwhile, proponents have been emphasizing the need for slots to solve the state's financial crisis, and Gov. Martin O'Malley has been pushing for the referendum's passage at public appearances. The Democratic governor warned at a recent event that deep cuts to education, health care and public safety would be "inevitable" without an estimated $600 million that would accrue to the state from slots.
Maryland has been here before. The legislature wrangled with slots decades ago when residents in southern counties complained that thousands of slot machines, especially along a stretch of U.S. 301, had a corrupting influence on politics, the economy and family life. The machines were banned in 1963 and phased out over five years.
Former Gov. Marvin Mandel, who was speaker of the House of Delegates at the time, said slots owners were given the chance to keep the machines spinning if they accepted state regulation and taxation, but they refused. With proper regulation, like what's being proposed in the current referendum, "it's not quite the picture of corruption" that opponents paint, he said.
In more recent years, machines that looked and played liked slot machines, but that owners characterized as bingo games, proliferated under a legal loophole. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch agreed this year to ban the lookalike machines, in part, because they could diminish revenues from slots that could be ushered in by the referendum.
Busch and Miller had come together a few months earlier to win passage of the referendum legislation, the culmination of five years of debate that began with proposals from former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican. Busch had been a longtime slots foe but backed the referendum last year as part of a broader budget-balancing package forwarded by O'Malley. Miller and Busch are both Democrats.
